STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

China's Personal Bodyguard Training Seems Ridiculously Intense

Bodyguards, the often terrible henchmen found in video games and movies, are very important in real life. These men and women protect their charges with the utmost severity. In China, professional bodyguards take their jobs seriously. Just take a look at their intense training!

Originally published on China News’ photo page, these images of would-be bodyguards are pretty intense. Chinese reporters and photographers recently had a chance to sit through bodyguard training in the outskirts of Beijing.

In these photos, the would-be protectors take part in everything from team work training, mud rolling, to even wine tasting!

According to China Central Television, this year’s class of body guards are comprised of 7 women and 58 men aged 18-30 from all over China. CCTV points out that Chinese bodyguards can’t only be good at security, they have to be well-versed in multiple skills. Bodyguards at this institution have to learn a foreign language, be able to hold conversations, and judge wine on top of their combat skills.

The training looks pretty intense with 8-kilometer morning runs, diving through mud, and gun training. The school, run by an unnamed security company, employs former soldiers and bodyguards. It also employs foreign experts.

The students all have an Israeli flag on their uniforms. The reason for that is because the school works with the International Security Academy in Israel.

With China’s rise in wealth, the demand for personal security has also risen. Earlier this year, CNN reportedthat there is a demand for female body guards in China. As CNN reported, these Chinese bodyguards also serve as personal assistants to their clients.

[MIKA27]

Fantastically Wrong: The Murderous Plant That Grows From the Blood of Hanged Men

The root of the mandrake plant was once thought to scream when pulled from the ground, rendering agonizing death to all those without wax in their ears. Well, extra wax, I mean—like, a lot of it. Simply not swabbing your ears won’t save you from anything, much less a homicidal plant.

As a child, no villain was to me more savage than the zucchini. My mother grew the scoundrels in the backyard, and whether she was deliberately scheming to improve her yields, or the climate just happened to have been ideal those years, season after season they got bigger and bigger. They grew so large and numerous that I eventually had to leave home—mostly because I went to college, but the zucchini certainly didn’t help.

I realize now that I had been quite lucky in my tanglings with zucchini, for in the Mediterranean there grows a far more murderous plant called the mandrake. Its roots can look bizarrely like a human body, and legend holds that it can even come in male and female form. It’s said to spring from the dripping fat and blood and semen of a hanged man. Dare pull it the from the earth and it lets out a monstrous scream, bestowing agony and death to all those within earshot.

Yet there is a way to safely uproot a mandrake—safely, that is, if you aren’t a dog with a bastard of an owner. If you really, really want one, the myths say to tie a hungry hound’s leash or even its tail to the plant. Back away, plug your ears with wax (a folkloric echo, by the way, of Odysseus ordering his crew to do the same as they passed the devious Sirens), and reveal a treat. The overzealous dog will sprint and consequently uproot the mandrake, but will immediately keel over in searing pain as its quarry lies there screaming.

Based on this little fella’s eyes, you’d think he was an opium poppy. He’s actually a mandrake who may or may not have a drug problem.

How did it come to this? When did we start sacrificing our pets to shouting plants? How could our legendary fear and hatred of the mandrake surpass even my legendary fear and hatred of zucchini?

In reality, mandrakes aren’t what you would call “super great” for human consumption, at least in large quantities. It’s a member of the famously deadly nightshade family, plants that contain, among other toxins, the highly poisonous compound solanine, which naturally wards off insects. (Tomatoes and potatoes, by the way, also belong to this family and do indeed contain solanine, though the bulk of the compound is isolated to the leaves instead of the edible bits.)

These solanum alkaloids also are present in the mandrake, but their side effects of delirium and gastrointestinal distress and even shock didn’t bother the ancient Greeks nohow. They valued the mandrake for the number of other compounds that give it soporific properties, that is, the root can make you really sleepy. Indeed, the Greeks used it as an anesthetic for surgery, a practice that continued into the Middle Ages. The Greeks also used it as an aphrodisiac, steeping the root in wine or vinegar—mandrake is known as the “love-apple of the ancients,” and is associated with the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite.

Similarly, the ancient Hebrews believed the mandrake could be used to induce conception. This appears in Genesis, where Rachel, supposedly barren, ate mandrake and was able to conceive Joseph. In the Middle Ages, the fertility powers of mandrake gained new credence under the so-called doctrine of signatures, which held that plants bearing resemblances to body parts could be used to treat their associated limbs and organs. Mandrakes can look rather like babies, so those having trouble conceiving would sleep with them under their pillows. The mandrake roots, not actual babies.

Mandrake roots can look strangely human-like. This one needs to get to the gym to take care of those thighs.

And it wasn’t just about mandrakes getting people horny and fertile. According to Anthony John Carter, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2003, medieval folks carried mandrake roots around as good luck charms, hoping the plant would grant them not only wealth and the power to control their destiny, but the ability to control the destinies of others as well. The Catholic Church wasn’t so hot on this, as you can imagine. And unfortunately for Joan of Arc, at her trial in 1431 she was accused of habitually carrying one. She denied this, though it didn’t really matter. Her accusers seemed more concerned that she dressed like a dude and stuff rather than what kind of vegetation she had in her pockets.

Still, the mandrake was widely held to work miracles. But miracles don’t come cheap: The belief in its curative effects led to runaway demand. “Mandrake roots became highly sought after in their native Mediterranean habitat,” Carter writes, “and attempts to protect them from theft are thought to have been the source of” the myth of the ferocious plant.

And high demand for a valuable commodity will also, of course, lead to the proliferation of knockoffs. Mandrakes were the veritable luxury purses of the 16th century, and fraudsters went to great lengths to counterfeit the anthropomorphic root. Typically they used bryony, a kind of climbing plant and member of the gourd family, carving it into a human form and, for added realism and perversion, adding wheat or grass for pubic hair.

The great botanist William Turner scolded such hucksters in 1568, sometimes using Y’s instead of I’s presumably for dramatic effect: “The rootes which are counterfited and made like little pupettes or mammettes which come to be sold in England in boxes with heir and such forme as a man hath are nothyng elles but foolishe trifles and not naturall. For they are so trymmed of crafty theves to mocke the poore people with all and to rob them both of theyr wit and theyr money.”

To extract mandrakes, simply sacrifice the family dog by tying it to the plant and tempting it with a treat. “I’m gonna go this way,” says the man in red, “so you die instead of me. It’s been real!”

It was a far better fate, Turner would have had to admit, than you or your dog dropping dead after getting an earful from a mandrake root. Turner himself described how to prepare mandrake root for anesthesia, making sure to note that it is a rather unpredictable medicine, what with the, you know, putting people into comas. Accordingly, around this time, notes Carter, the use of mandrake roots in medicine rapidly declined. “The popularity of the myths, however, remained undimmed,” he writes.

The mythologizing of the mandrake—all the screaming and growing out of the blood of hanged men and such—shows up in the works of Shakespeare and the dramatist John Webster. They helped seal the villainization of the mandrake, even for several hundred more years. At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, a British bloke digging a garden cut through some of bryony roots. He mistook it for a mandrake, “and ceased to work at once, saying it was ‘awful bad luck.’ Before the week was out, he fell down some steps and broke his neck.”

Whether the man’s dog was also injured in the fall, however, remains unclear. The potential irony therefore is sadly lost to history.

[MIKA27]

Sharp's Free-Form Display Make Bezels Super-Thin, Screens Any Shape

Rectangular screens are so square. That’s presumably why Sharp has announced a new technology called Free-Form Display that could allow screens to come in any space, and reduce bezel size to almost zero.

Usually, a lot of display circuitry sits in the bezel of a screen, which forces manufacturers to use very conventional shapes — rectangles, usually, but occasionally circles if they’re daring. But Sharp’s new solution spreads circuitry usually found at the edge across the whole display, allowing both very slim bezels and crazy shapes too. Sharp explains:

Conventional displays are rectangular because they require a minimal width for the bezel in order to accommodate the drive circuit, called the gate driver, around the perimeter of the screen’s display area. With the Free-Form Display, the gate driver’s function is dispersed throughout the pixels on the display area. This allows the bezel to be shrunk considerably, and it gives the freedom to design the LCD to match whatever shape the display area of the screen needs to be.

The company is showing off, for instance, a Free-Form display that could find its way into cars: a sleek dash screen that needs no cowling above it, but display everything in three simple circular areas. But the possibilities are endless: think wearables with more natural screen shapes, displays that blend in a little more around the house, or simply thin tablets with a screen that reaches right to the edge. Or maybe even a weirdly shaped smartphone, if someone is crazy enough to try it.

Software, of course, is typically designed for rectangular screens, so the bezel-free route seems most appealing — but to differentiate products, or to allow such displays to be used in more unconventional situations, it could just work. There’s currently no word on when or where we might first see the panels appear though, sadly.

[MIKA27]

Blackmailers Held Nokia Code To Ransom For Millions Of Euros

Blackmail is a nasty business, but it’s not just the stuff of movie plots: Nokia was in 2008 forced to pay “several million euros” to criminals who held its code to ransom, reports Reuters.

The Finnish company found itself in difficulties six years ago, with criminals apparently threatening to reveal the source code “for part of an operating system used in its smartphones”. In fact, according to sources at Finnish MTV, they had obtained the encryption key for Symbian and were threatening to make it public.

It was enough to allow them to extort “several million euros” from Nokia. Like something straight out of Hollywood, Nokia apparently found itself agreeing to deliver the cash to a parking lot in Tampere, central Finland — although it did so only once it had alerted the police to what was happening.

Reuters claims that the money was picked up, but that the police “lost track of the culprits”. The Finnish police has confirmed to Reuters that it’s currently investigating a case of alleged blackmail against Nokia. The case remains open.

[MIKA27]

Apple Introduces Cut-Price iMac

In the market for a new iMac? Good news! Apple just introduced a new cut-price base model.

It’s a new entry-level, 21.5-inch iMac packing a dual-core 1.4GHz Intel Core i5 processor (the former base model used to pack a 2.7GHz Intel Core i5), 500GB hard drive and 8GB of RAM.

It’s available from the Apple Store right now for $1349.

Australia Tax?

Now you might think that the price discrepancy between Australia and the US means that the Australia Tax is alive and well at the fruit stand, but it isn’t as bad as you might think.

If you adjust the price of the new low-price iMac to Australian dollars ($US1 = $A0.934), you’ll find it costs $1176. Tack on the 10 per cent Goods and Services Tax and you get an iMac that costs you $1293. Include the cost of re-shipping the device to Australia and you’ll find it’s more costly than the Australian sticker price of $1349. There’s a $100 or so discrepancy on the US, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the Australia Tax on the Mac Pro.

The reason you immediately look at the two prices and think we’re getting ripped off is because US retailers aren’t required to show prices inclusive of sales tax, wheras Aussie retailers are required by law to include the GST.

[MIKA27]

Everything You Need to Know About Amazon’s New Fire Phone

Amazon’s first smartphone, the Fire Phone, looks like an amazing piece of hardware. You’ll want to play around with it the first chance you get.

There are cameras tucked into all four corners of the front of its 4.7-inch screen—not for taking Brady Bunch selfies, but to pull off some fancy “Dynamic Perspective” tricks. Using the camera’s face-tracking input, you can look around onscreen objects, even peer behind them. It’s not about popping-out-of-the-screen 3-D, but about infusing a sense of depth and realism into a bunch of flat pixels. Your phone becomes a little diorama box, with stunning effects for 3-D maps, games, and homescreen wallpaper.

That dynamic perspective is also meant to make using the Fire Phone with one hand a lot easier. You can tilt the phone to scroll through news articles or books, as well as navigate through screens.

The other cameras will also be put to use for the phone’s Firefly feature, basically an everything-scanner. By launching the Firefly app with a dedicated button and pointing the phone’s back camera at anything—book covers, cans of soup, video game boxes, phone numbers, restaurant signs, UPC codes, QR codes—you can create a queue of things to identify, save on the device, or buy on Amazon. It also has Shazam-like features to identify songs to buy or find on streaming services, and even pinpoint scenes in movies or TV shows based on the audio track.

USING THE CAMERA’S FACE-TRACKING INPUT, YOU CAN LOOK AROUND ONSCREEN OBJECTS, EVEN PEER BEHIND THEM.

These are all innovative features augmented by Amazon’s hardware development and services, and they’re not just window dressing. As a plain old phone, Amazon’s first offering looks to be a very good one. It has a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 system-on-a-chip at its heart with 2GB RAM, just like other previous generation Android phones out there. It also has a 13-megapixel main camera with optical stabilization and an F2.0 lens. Like Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, the Fire Phone’s speakers offer Dolby virtual surround sound and what Amazon describes as tangle-free earbuds. It comes with free unlimited storage on Amazon Cloud Drive, and for a limited time 1,000 Amazon Coins (a $10 value) for apps, games, and in-app purchases.

The bigger question is whether the display, connectivity, camera, and other features—all backed by Amazon’s ability to deliver anything from movies and music to groceries and gadgets via the device—can make a dent in the iPhone/Android-dominated mobile market. But wait, isn’t this an Android phone?

Sort of. The Amazon phone runs Android, but it does it in the same way the company’s Kindle Fire tablets do. Which is to say it’s a heavily modified version of the mobile OS. The major difference is that Amazon’s new phone, like its tablets, won’t run every Android app.

Amazon offers its approved collection of apps via its own Amazon Appstore; you can’t just fire up Google Play and go to town. One stat speaks to that: There are 240,000 apps in Amazon’s Appstore, while iOS and Android each have about five times as many offerings. You’ll get most of the big-name games, social-networking apps, video apps, and music services you’re looking for, but not all of them. Instagram, SnapChat, and YouTube are notable omissions, for example.

Like every other piece of the company’s hardware, this is a phone built to be a pocketable Amazon pop-up store. The phone, like Amazon’s e-readers, tablets, and new set-top box, are meant as a way to mainline Amazon’s deep coffers of content. Amazon Prime, the company’s $99-a-year pass to two-day shipping, streaming videos, and now streaming music, is offered free with the phone for a full year to get you hooked.

Amazon says that plenty of people have gotten hooked in the past year, and CEO Jeff Bezos attributes Amazon Prime’s growth to the company’s entry-point hardware: “Tens of millions of Kindle owners” and “tens of millions of Kindle Fire owners” tapping into Amazon Prime services.

According to Bezos, that’s dozens of millions of people who now trust Amazon. He drilled home the idea that Amazon leads a slew of consumer brand-trust surveys in today’s announcement.

Bulking up the Amazon Appstore is another big reason this phone exists. Even though its out-of-box features look incredible, the phone’s success may hinge on the creativity of third-party developers. Amazon is certainly hoping that the unique opportunities presented by its new hardware will inspire developers. There’s simply nothing like it to develop for out there: The eye-tracking, the gesture controls, the way onscreen objects take on a new viewable dimension. Amazon says that SDKs for both Firefly and Dynamic Perspective are now available.

In the best case scenario, this phone spurs a wave of apps that make good use of 3-D effects and hands-free navigation. If it’s a true development breakthrough and not just a gimmick, people will want those apps. And they’ll need this phone to run them (for the time being, at least). In the worst case scenario, people will think this phone sounds kinda cool, play with it for a few minutes in an AT&T store, and go back to buying the iPhones and Galaxys they always have.

Pricing for the Fire Phone will be $200 for the 32GB version and $300 for the 64GB one. Both of those are with two-year contracts. It will only be available on AT&T for the time being, and will go on sale July 25th. Amazon is also offering a limited time deal that gives Prime and non-Prime users either an extra year of membership or a one-year complimentary one, respectively.

[MIKA27]

The Seven Signs You're in a Cult

A former member of a tight-knit college prayer group describes his community's disintegration—and how one of its members ended up dead.

Bethany Deaton in 2008.

November 2, 2012, was a beautiful Friday in Kansas City—clear and cool and sunny. I had spent the afternoon reading in the library at an unaccredited college affiliated with the International House of Prayer, an evangelical Christian organization commonly referred to as IHOP (no relation to the restaurant). Around 6 pm, I got a call from my friend Hannah*.

“I found out something that’s truly devastating. I didn’t want to tell you this way, but I want you to know,” she said. “Bethany Leidlein committed suicide on Tuesday.”

I was shocked. For seven years, I had spent hours every day with Bethany, eating and talking and praying. We had been best friends. She was 27, newly married; she had just completed her nursing degree. I felt like she would always be part of my life.

Now, she was gone.

For three weeks, Hannah and I had been trying to contact leaders at IHOP about a prayer group that we, Bethany, and many of our friends had been part of—a small, independent community that drew on IHOP's teachings. In February, I had been formally excommunicated, and Hannah had left in June. Looking in from the outside, both of us saw the group differently than we had when we were part of it: We saw it as a cult.

Several years ago, the founder of IHOP, Mike Bickle, created a list of seven ways to recognize the difference between a religious community and a cult. Written down, the signs seem clear:

1. Opposing critical thinking

2. Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving

3. Emphasizing special doctrines outside scripture

4. Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders

5. Dishonoring the family unit

6. Crossing Biblical boundaries of behavior (versus sexual purity and personal ownership)

7. Separation from the Church

But when it’s your friends, your faith, your community, it’s not so obvious. For several years, roughly two dozen people, all younger than thirty, had been living together in Kansas City, Missouri, and following the leadership of Tyler Deaton, one of our classmates from Southwestern University in Texas. In the summer of 2012, Tyler had married Bethany; by the fall, she was dead. What started as a dorm-room prayer group had devolved into something much darker.

I met Bethany and Tyler during the week of their freshman orientation in 2005. Small, with a heart-shaped face and bright blue eyes, Bethany’s effortless wit and warm presence quickly attracted a devoted group of friends. She often spoke about the “glories of the world” and its wonders over brunch in the dining hall. We bonded over our shared love of stories and would often stay up late discussing our dreams of becoming great novelists and joining the ranks of our literary heroes.

One day during that first week, I found Tyler in the school’s chapel. He was seated at the piano, the late-afternoon sunlight illuminating his dark eyes and hair as he swayed back and forth, stomping the pedals and singing a popular evangelical chorus in a voice full of heartache and passion:

Your love is extravagant

Your friendship, it is intimate

I feel like I’m moving to the rhythm of your grace

Your fragrance is intoxicating

In the secret place

Because your love is extravagant

At the end of the song, he came over and introduced himself. Something about the nasally pitch of his voice made me wonder if he was ***. A few months later I would work up the courage to ask him; the question offended him so much that I didn’t bring it up again until the end of that year, when he conceded that he had been “struggling with same-sex attraction” for years.

That semester, we became close friends. Early on, I felt as though Tyler often tried to manipulate people into doing what he wanted, but he was also a committed Christian, zealous and humble. Inspired by his sensitivity toward others and bravery in confronting his personal demons, I learned to ignore my initial reservations and trust him.

Two years later, in the summer of 2007, Tyler returned from a trip to Pakistan and announced that God was going to launch a spiritual revolution on our campus. Those of us who knew him well were surprised by the changes in his personality. He had always been extraordinarily perceptive, but now this ability had reached uncanny levels. He could describe conversations he wasn’t involved in that were taking place on the other side of campus. He said God was always speaking. He claimed he could tell what we were thinking, when we were sinning; he said he could feel in his own body what God felt about us.

When I found out he and Bethany were meeting every night for prayer with their two roommates, June and Justin*, I begged them to let me join. It was discouraging to see some of my best and only friends at Southwestern sharing an experience from which I was excluded; I wanted to belong to their group. I was lonely and bored, and I wanted to experience something extraordinary before I left school: a mystery to solve, a battle to fight, a romantic quest, like the heroes in the stories I had read. All my favorite songs and stories ended with some powerful and often tragic moment of catharsis. I wanted college to end like that. If it didn’t, my life would be boring, anti-climactic … normal.

I had always imagined my life in terms of a story, and now Tyler was offering me the chance to be a part of one. He had developed a distinctly Charismatic vocabulary of “spiritual warfare” and claimed he was communicating directly with God. He said the five of us had been chosen for a dangerous but important mission: changing the nature and understanding of Christianity on our campus. Like the characters of Morpheus or Hagrid, he became our escort into a secret community where evil was battled at close quarters and darkness lurked around every corner.

That first semester was exhilarating. Our prayer experiences were very emotional; sometimes, we wept. Though I still secretly had doubts about the authenticity of the group’s beliefs, I was profoundly moved by the courage and loyalty my friends were showing towards one another. It felt like being in an epic adventure, in which each of the main characters bravely faces his or her own weaknesses while bonding together in the heat of battle.

Bethany continued to be my closest friend in the group. We confided in one another—including our mild doubts about the group. One night in early November, a few of the group members tried to “heal” a girl with cerebral palsy, even pulling her out of her wheelchair and dragging her around the chapel. Word quickly spread around campus that the girl had been miraculously healed, but I told Bethany I wasn’t convinced that anything really unusual had happened.

Near the end of November, she admitted she had feelings for Tyler. She said God had told her they were going to be married, once he was fully healed of his struggle with homosexuality. During vacations, we would discuss this for hours. She cried regularly.

Around this time, Tyler attended an IHOP conference. At the four-day gathering in Kansas City, Missouri, where the movement is based, he joined 25,000 other young people to pray for spiritual revival on college campuses throughout America. He heard the evangelical leader Lou Engle share a dream he’d had, in which college students were cutting off the heads of their professors, suggesting the end of the “spirit of intellectualism” that gripped academia. He heard Bickle declare that God was raising up a prophetic generation that would perform “signs and wonders,” and numerous stories of angelic visitations.

After Tyler returned from the conference, his experiences with the supernatural seemed to intensify dramatically. As we walked across campus, he would see an army of demons carrying banners in front of the library. At the end of January, God revealed to him that his calling in life was to be an apostle and train God’s “final people.” When Bethany and June insisted that we find mentors who could train us and brought us to visit a Christian couple who lived nearby, Tyler “discerned” that the husband was living in “graphic sexual sin.” Somehow, when he said this, the rest of us realized we had all been feeling the same thing. We never went back.

I was profoundly affected by IHOP’s teachings. I began to seriously consider the possibility that we were living in the last generation. The teachers and staff all had a message for the students: Everything we thought we knew about the world was wrong. We had been poisoned by a liberal culture teaching seductive lies about “love” and “compassion” that the devil was using to prepare his end-times deception.

Before joining the prayer group, I had been a fairly tolerant person. Now I was different. I was belligerent toward my *** and atheist friends. I picked fights and insulted them viciously. But I felt justified; I thought they were blind to God’s truth.

As the prayer group expanded, it became an enchanted sphere where supernatural things seemed to be happening all the time. I began having ominous dreams in which the school was flooded and taken over by monsters. Once, we found a candy wrapper in the ceiling of one of our members, Micah Moore; we burned it, because God showed us that it had been used to practice witchcraft. In the everyday college world of exams and choir concerts and dining-hall meals, these episodes seemed outlandish—and to outsiders, maybe even disturbing. But within the Gnostic dream world of our small Charismatic enclave, they seemed perfectly normal. By the end of the next semester, several of us were already making plans to move to Kansas City.

I was kicked out of the prayer group for the first time a year and a half later. Roughly two dozen of us were now living together in group houses in Missouri, sharing our money and working part-time jobs while we attended classes at IHOP University. Three nights a week, we worshipped together.

Tyler and other members of the group claimed I had a “wicked heart, prone to self-protection, anger, unforgiveness, and hate” and a “malicious, accusatory, group-rejecting, self-protective hatred towards most people.” After an intense night of confrontation in the fall of 2010, the group stopped speaking to me. I continued to live in the house, but I was completely isolated.

Why did I stay? I was conflicted. All of my friends said I had a serious problem—so serious that I had been effectively quarantined. These were my closest friends in the world. I began to wonder if they might be right. Maybe I truly was hateful, malicious—wicked. I no longer trusted by own instincts.

When my boss saw that I was depressed and had stopped eating, she contacted one of the senior leaders at IHOP University. We met, and I described my living situation.

“Hold on,” he said, in a very serious voice. “Are you being shunned as a punishment?”

With his guidance, I emailed Tyler and asked if I could return; under pressure from IHOP University’s leaders, he consented. The group threw a huge party in my honor, but within a few days, I began to wish I had never come back.

Tyler now said he could sense when a person was sinning. “There’s nothing you’ve done for a long time that doesn’t have sin in it,” he explained to me. Under his mandatory system of “behavioral modifications,” as he called them, the entire group was being rapidly restructured. People were giving up their nicknames, distancing themselves from their romantic partners, and taking breaks from their music or families—anything to which they had developed “idolatrous attachments.” I was forbidden from reading and writing, prohibited from having serious conversations with the girls, and forced to wear new clothes, which Tyler picked out for me.

The group was being run like a military boot camp, with chores and activities to keep us occupied virtually every hour of the day. The girls would wake up around seven to clean their house before the guys came over for lunch. During the afternoon, some of us would go to class at IHOP University while others worked or prayed. Around five, we would reconvene at one of the houses to prepare dinner. We would eat between 6:00 pm and 7:30 pm and then spend several hours praying or singing. Once every few weeks, there was even a surprise evacuation drill.

We had prophecy time at least three nights a week. During these sessions, the group would sit in silence and listen for the whisper of God’s spirit. Everyone said similar things, although they often ended up being proven wrong later. Those who disagreed were called out for being arrogant and rebellious and were forced to repent.

By the end of that summer, even the slightest gesture, no matter how innocent, could be misconstrued as evidence of demonic influence. One night in August, Tyler and June both had dreams in which God “revealed” that my individuality was endangering the community. As a precaution, I was isolated, and two of the boys kept constant watch over me. I could be reprimanded for scratching another man’s back, for sitting with a blanket over my legs, for looking at someone the wrong way. Once, Micah accused me of manipulating someone into coming over and hugging me.

After a woman in the group had her bedroom door and Bible taken away from her, she complained to IHOP. The organization’s leaders met with Tyler and warned him that his group was becoming “cult-like.” Tyler began having regular meetings with them. He was ordered to quit punishing people and stop mandating that the students in our group come to his Saturday worship session rather than IHOP University’s mandatory meeting.

And I was beginning to face my own doubts. My questions about the group had been accumulating for years, but one night, I heard the group praying against me in the next room. That moment helped me admit something to myself, something big: They weren’t actually hearing the voice of God. My friends and I were all being whipped into a frenzy by the delirious tonic of prophecy and persecution fantasies.

The week after Bethany and Tyler’s engagement in February 2012, the men came to me and asked me to leave the community. At first I was distraught. If I moved out, I would be walking away from all my best friends. I had hoped I could push the group in a more positive direction. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew it was time for me to go. On the first day of April, I moved out. The rest of the group was forbidden from contacting me, and I wasn’t invited to the wedding.

Bethany Deaton and the author in 2008.

The weeks after Bethany’s death were among the blackest of my life. One of my dearest and best friends was dead, and I couldn’t accept the explanation that she had killed herself two months into a marriage she had been looking forward to for years. Even the logistics of grieving were complicated; on the day of her visitation, Tyler tried to have me removed from the funeral home.

Meanwhile, IHOP sent several leaders to investigate the prayer community. It took them only a couple of hours with the group on the night after Bethany’s death to conclude that Tyler was leading a cult. The boys who still lived with Tyler were asked to move out immediately, and current and former members were questioned.

And then they interrogated Micah, the person who had been charged with guarding me during one of my periods of isolation from the group. During questioning, he broke down and confessed that he had suffocated Bethany. He later said Tyler had told him to commit the murder, saying he “had it in him to do it.” The next day—the day of Bethany’s funeral in Arlington, Texas—he drove to the police station and turned himself in. There, he told a lurid tale: He and other men in the group had sexual relationships with Tyler, and together, they had ritually assaulted Bethany. She had been killed, Micah said, because they were afraid she would tell her therapist about the assaults.

This raised intense questions in the IHOP community, and Bickle and others held information sessions to address them. When one student asked how this kind of dangerous group could have existed with hardly anyone noticing, they explained that my friends and I were transplants from Texas who had developed an intense loyalty to one another and a spiritual leader who operated in secrecy. “There were people there who should have had careers," he said. “They had degrees, law degrees. But they had given up their goals for the vision of this one man.” He reminded the students that Judas had spent three years in the company of Jesus and his disciples without anyone suspecting the wickedness he was capable of.

Talking to members of the IHOP community, I get the impression that they want to forget what happened. If only they had read their Bibles more, I hear them saying. If only they had paid more attention to Bickle’s teachings. If only they hadn’t been led astray by their secular college environment. If only... I believe the movement's leaders have encouraged the perception that we were not “real, born-again Christians”—Tyler was not dangerous because of his grandiose delusions, they say, but because of his “evil homosexual agenda.”

Though some of the group’s former members remained part of the prophetic movement, I mentally checked out after Bethany’s death. I joined a church in a liturgical tradition and formed a new circle of friends, many of whom had also left IHOP. I began to rethink my views on homosexuality and other marginalized groups. I also underwent counseling with IHOP leaders. During this process, I tried to renounce what I saw as harmful beliefs, including the conviction that our group had been messengers called to battle the forces of the anti-Christ. To my surprise and dismay, they told me, “No, Tyler was right about that. You need to pray out loud for God to show you your calling.”

In other words, our group’s biggest crime wasn’t an excess of zeal—it was not being zealous enough. It seems to me that our community was not exceptional, given the high-intensity spiritual environment we were part of. Tyler was not an isolated individual, but the product of a phenomenally twisted system.

It’s unclear who is responsible for Bethany's death. Micah's trial is set for this November. He has recanted his confession; his lawyer said his statements were made by “a distraught and confused young man under extreme psychological pressure.” Tyler has not been charged in the case.

But it is clear that when Bethany died, she was part of a community shrouded in fear and hatred, a community where those who spoke out were treated as though they didn’t exist. Their loves, desires, opinions, feelings, and whole personalities were invalidated, all in the name of God.

[MIKA27]

Even Iraq's Sinners Deserve to Be Heard

In recent days, two debates have broken out in the American media about Iraq. The first is about the wisdom of renewed military intervention to halt, or roll back, the gains made by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The second is about whether policymakers and pundits who supported invading Iraq in the first place have the standing to advocate going to war there again. Not surprisingly, hawks generally consider debate number two a diversion, and have tried to forestall it with comments like, “Regardless of what anyone thinks of going into Iraq in 2002 …” and “Now is not the time to re-litigate … the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.” Not surprisingly, doves generally believe that conducting debate number one without debate number two is like going into surgery without inquiring why the doctor who’s about to cut you open botched the operation the first time.

I think the doves are right, with one caveat. One of the most frustrating aspects of American foreign-policy discourse is the fact that it takes place a la carte. A crisis emerges, a familiar group of commentators appear on TV to discuss it, and they present their comments with a kind of virginal, pre-lapsarian innocence, as if nothing they said before is of any relevance. This isn’t only a problem because their past opinions may have been wrong. It’s also a problem because their past opinions may conflict with the ones they’re offering today. In the real world, America’s military capacity and diplomatic leverage are limited, which creates difficult tradeoffs. Take an ultra-hard line against Moscow’s takeover of Crimea and it may become harder to win Russia’s backing for continued sanctions against Tehran. Bomb Iran and it may become harder, both logistically and politically, to also bomb Iraq (starve the government of revenue with big tax cuts and you may find it harder to do either). The a-la-carte nature of foreign-policy punditry prevents commentators from having to confront those tradeoffs, which allows uber-hawks like Bill Kristol and John McCain to urge the most aggressive response to each successive crisis without explaining how America can go to DEFCON 1 against all its adversaries at the same time.

Doves are right that when offering their views on the foreign-policy topic du jour, pundits should be confronted with the views they offered in the past, especially when discussing the same country. Simply knowing such questions were coming, I suspect, would make folks like Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Bremer, and **** Cheney—all of whom have publicly criticized Obama’s Mideast policies in recent weeks—think twice before accepting interview requests. It’s certainly had that effect on me. Earlier this week, I was asked to go on TV to discuss Iraq. After some noodling, I decided the only way to do so ethically would be to explain, as a preface to my first answer, that I had supported invading Iraq in 2003 and been egregiously wrong. I still did the interview, but it was harder that way.

Still, saying that Iraq hawks should have to squirm their way through debate number two before getting to debate number one is different than saying, as Paul Waldman recently did in The Washington Post, that “On Iraq, let’s ignore those who got it all wrong.” In fact, the two positions are antithetical. You can either ignore the people who got Iraq wrong or you can ask them tough, searching questions about why they got it wrong. Doing the latter brings past debates to bear on present ones, and helps clarify what our disastrous 2003 intervention can teach us about intervention today. Doing the former offers no such opportunity at all.

Which brings me to the caveat. Part of the rationale for giving people who got Iraq wrong last time the chance to explain why this intervention is different is that they may be right. Supporting the Iraq invasion was an unusually big mistake, but sooner or later, almost everyone who offers opinions about war makes mistakes. Ted Kennedy opposed overthrowing Manuel Noriega. Colin Powell opposed the Gulf War, as did most Democrats in Congress. Jimmy Carter thought it such a bad idea that he urged other nations to reject authorization for force at the UN. Michael Moore opposed NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo. The Nation called it a “careless, cowardly and destructive war.” In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, in fact, some hawks did exactly what Waldman is doing now. They urged the public to “ignore those who got it all wrong” when they opposed successful military actions in the 1990s.

If accurately forecasting the last war were a reliable guide to accurately forecasting the next one, foreign policy would be a lot simpler. In fact, American history is littered with people who looked prescient one moment and foolish the next: critics of World War I who therefore opposed American entry into World War II; champions of World War II who therefore supported America’s war in Vietnam; champions of the Balkan interventions who therefore supported America’s invasion of Iraq.

The point is that everyone—whether they got the last war right or not—should approach the next one with humility. Everyone should answer for his or her past mistakes but no one should be written out of the debate because of them. Judging by the past century of American foreign policy, it’s precisely when people are most confident history has proven them right that they’re most likely to be wrong.

[MIKA27]

Uruguay squad's caramel spread confiscated in Brazil

Brazilian officials say they confiscated 39kg (86lb) of caramel spread from Uruguay's football team as it arrived in Brazil for the World Cup.

The spread, called dulce de leche, is extremely popular in Uruguay but the Brazilian authorities said that as it was made with milk, it needed sanitary documentation which was lacking.

Some fans are already blaming Uruguay's shock 3-1 defeat to Costa Rica on the lack of dulce de leche.

Uruguay will play England on Thursday.

The dulce de leche was seized from the team after it landed at Confins airport near their training camp in Sete Lagoas.

Uruguay fans fear their team has been thrown out of kilter due to the lack of dulce de leche

Deprived of dulce de leche, Uruguay fans have had to resort to other sweets

An official with the Brazilian agriculture department told Reuters news agency that the Uruguayans could have the dulce de leche back "as soon as they can produce the necessary documents".

"Or they can pick it up on their way out of Brazil," the official added.

It is not clear if one person carried the entire 39kg-stash or if the jars of the popular sweet paste had been distributed between the players.

Former Uruguay goalkeeper Juan Castillo said the team had also taken dulce de leche to the World Cup in South Africa, where they had not had any problems at customs.

Dulce de leche is made by cooking down milk with sugar, baking soda and vanilla extract.

It is very popular spread on bread, pancakes and biscuits, or poured over fruit or ice-cream.

MIKA: What is it about dulce de leche!? My wife from Chile also loves this stuff, it is nice but would I make a song and dance about it if I couldn't eat it?

[MIKA27]

89-Year-Old Man Accused of Assisting in Nazi Genocide

Germany has charged him with 158 counts of aiding and abetting Nazi attrocities

An 89-year-old Philadelphia man was arrested by U.S. officials Tuesday and a day later charged by German authorities with 158 counts of assisting in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jewish prisoners and others while he was a Nazi guard at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Johann “Hans” Breyer, a retired toolmaker from Czechoslovakia, is the oldest person ever arrested in connection with crimes committed during the Holocaust, according to the New York Times.

Officials say Breyer joined the paramilitary Waffen-SS force at age 17, and later worked at Birkenau, a section of the concentration camp at Auschwitz that housed gas chambers. Breyer admitted to the Associated Press that he worked as a guard at Auschwitz-Berkenau, but he said his duties kept him outside the facility and he had nothing to do with the killings committed inside the gates.

Breyer’s attorney, Dennis Boyle, tried to get Breyer released on bail Wednesday, arguing that he is too frail to be detained. But prosecutors said the facility where Breyer is being taken is equipped to take care of him. Magistrate Judge Timothy R. Rice said Breyer appeared to understand the proceedings and would not be granted bail due to the “the serious nature of the crime.”

Breyer’s arrest renews a case that officials in multiple countries have pursued for years. The U.S. Justice Department first accused Breyer of Nazi ties in 1992 and fought to deport him until 2003, according to the AP. The DOJ questioned whether Breyer lied about his Nazi involvement when applying for citizenship or whether he could have citizenship through his mother, who was born in the U.S. He was allowed to stay in the U.S. largely because he joined the SS as a minor.

Germany now wants Breyer extradited so he can stand trial for the charges against him in that country.

[MIKA27]

Mystery of Tangled iPhone Earbuds Solved Through Mathematics

It doesn’t matter if earbuds are rolled neatly and stuffed into a pocket, haplessly tossed into a bag, or kept in a pretty little box, more often than not, there is a knot in them when retrieved, and just like a lab rat seeking its hourly bump of cocaine, you have to solve the puzzle at hand before you can get your fix. The practice goes on day after day after day unless you convert to using one of the countless ways to prevent it, which often take as much time and effort as does untangling the basic knots often formed with free-range earbuds.

Earbuds have been around for decades, but the popularity of the iPhone and iPod, combined with Apple’s insistence on providing the little white-corded, micro-speakers, as their standard listening device for them, have made them more common than ever. Aside from the earbud’s potential for damaging your hearing at high volumes, they also come with an even higher potential for frustrating self-knotting.

But why?

Why are these things so hard to keep unknotted?

A couple of guys from the University of California at San Diego decided to look at this issue more closely. Turns out there is mathematical explanation. The researchers used concepts of Knot Theory, yes Knot Theory is a thing, and it predates earbuds by about a century, and analyzed the probability of knot formation on a string, much like Apple’s earbuds, using factors like length, flexural rigidity, diameter, and factors of agitation. It is truly the kind of stuff that will make your head explode, if like me, you not only failed high school physics, but took three tries to pass college algebra before finally getting through it by scoring a “D” because the teacher liked you.

The results were published in a paper called Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String, and essentially concluded unless earbud cords are made in much shorter lengths, we’re all essentially screwed when it comes to knot avoidance. Not only are we screwed, be we the screwing takes place on the wrong side of the probability curve.

To complete the study, researchers dropped a string into a 1-foot square box, allowing it to fall naturally, and then agitated the box by rotating it in a specific way that allowed them to repeat the experiment thousands of times with varying lengths of string. After the tumble, the string was removed by its ends, photographed, and then the ends were connected together to assist with analysis of the knot, as knot theory primarily revolves around knots in a circle. At least that’s what I get out of it, you can check it out for yourself if this kind of specific detail is what gets you off.

Anyway, the results showed, as one might expect, shorter strings are less likely to become knotted during the process than longer ones.

Let’s say the average set of iPhone earbuds come with 55 inches, 139 cm, of cord, which includes the wire after the split to each ear piece. I use that number because it is one I saw in a report related to this particular study. It also seemed to agree with the numbers I saw on Apple’s website when I looked at iPhone accessories. (I should note, different models of earbuds come in different lengths, so being overly specific is kind of difficult without devoting way too much space to it.)

The probability that set of earbuds knotting during the agitation stage is right around 50 percent, according to the study’s results. That also happens to be the point where the curve comparing the results on a chart plotting probability and length begins to flatten out. This means cords longer than 55 inches, likely won’t knot with a significantly higher frequency. The curve up to that point, however, spikes dramatically.

Figure from Spontaneous knotting of an agitated string study.

The results can be affected by numerous other factors, including the size of the box, the stiffness of the string/wire being agitated, and the period for which it is actually under agitation, so applying this to a set of iPhone earbuds in a bag or pocket, is going to vary somewhat, but ultimately the principle of it all is still going to be the same.

So the odds are working against you when you put away your earbuds, even if you go to great lengths to coil them up before putting them away. If you drop them in a bag and carry them around for several days between use, or even several hours provided the bag is moved around, there is a good chance knots of some variety have formed. Therefore expecting anything less than a tangle when you retrieve them is just setting yourself up for disappointment.

I’m sure you didn’t need this article to point that out for you, but it’s always interesting to see mathematical evidence proving knot-tying gremlins do not live in your pocket, purse, backpack or briefcase.

[MIKA27]

Moon Getting a Bulge – Blames the Earth

If you looked at the last full moon and thought that Luna was showing a slight “bulge” – as we say in polite company – it wasn’t your imagination. For the first time, NASA scientists have satellite images confirming that the Moon is with bulge and the Earth is to blame.

Actually, we’ve known for some time from ground observations that the gravitational dance which the Earth and Moon spin around in has caused both celestial bodies to develop planetary spare tires and shapes more oval than spherical. It’s not as noticeable on Earth because the planet retains so much water that the bulge manifests itself in tides.

The effect on the Moon is called the lunar body tide. The Moon is solid except for a molten core so the bulge is smaller – 20 inches (50 centimeters) – on both the facing side and the far side.

That measurement was unconfirmed until recently when scientists used data from two NASA lunar satellites working in tandem to compare the heights of the bulges in relation to the force of gravity in those spots. Multiple readings from both satellites were essential since the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter maps the height of features on the lunar surface while the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory satellite maps the gravitation field.

Although the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth, the bulge is on both sides and actually moves around the lunar surface a few inches at a time, according to Erwan Mazarico, a NASA scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

The deformation of the moon due to Earth’s pull is very challenging to measure, but learning more about it gives us clues about the interior of the moon.

At 20 inches in height, it also gives some clues on how big the shock absorbers on the next lunar rovers need to be.

[MIKA27]

Alcatraz Ghost Sighting Spooks Visitors But Not Officials

A British tourist visiting Alcatraz, the most famous former prison in the U.S., got an other-worldly surprise when she took a picture of an old cell block while on an audio tour – on the other side of the window of the cell door was what appeared to be a woman.

Sheila Sillery-Walsh from Birmingham took the photo on her iPhone 5c while touring the famous and allegedly haunted Rock with her partner, Paul Rice.

When I glanced at the photo on my mobile, I saw this dark female figure in the picture. I looked at the window again and there was no-one in the room. I knew straight away that the woman in the photo was a ghost and showed the snap to Paul.

Sheila Sillery-Walsh and Paul Rice holding the alleged ghost picture.

How did she know it wasn’t just her reflection? Because her partner Paul told her it didn’t look anything like her – duh!

When I first saw the photo, I tried to rationalize the female figure away by saying it was just Sheila’s reflection. But with closer inspection, it’s obvious that this is not the case at all. The woman’s hair and clothing is from a different era – it looks like she’s from the 1930s or 40s.

It doesn’t look anything like any of the other apparitions reportedly spotted over the years at Alcatraz, including the Man With Glowing Eyes in the Hole, Al Capone playing his banjo in the shower and enough cold spots to make it an historical beer cooler.

Since it’s a woman, Sillery-Walsh thinks she might be a former prison visitor looking for an inmate.

Weirdly, when we were near that cell, a woman came on the audio tour who used to visit a prisoner. It makes you wonder.

As always, park officials, who refuse to sponsor ghost tours of the facility, dismiss the photo.

So what is it? Hoax? Ghost? Sext message from a long-ago prisoner’s girlfriend?

[MIKA27]

ARCHIPELAGO CINEMA FLOATING MOVIE THEATER

As we get older, and our home theater’s dopeness level rises, our desire to schlep to the movie theater dwindles. But this, now this, would get us off our asses.

The Archipelago Cinema is on the shoreline of Yao Noi, Thailand, and it was created for the Film on the Rocks Yao Noi Festival, organized by Tilda Swinton and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Designed by Beijing-based architect Ole Scheeren, the structure is basically a giant auditorium on a glowing raft, but it certainly looks a lot cooler than that simple description. Made with recycled materials, Archipelago Cinema welcomes guests by boat, who are then undoubtedly spoiled forever for their local mall cineplex. And ya know, despite the breathtaking setting, we’re sure there’d still be some putz texting during the movie.

[MIKA27]

THE GERBER ARTIFACT MULTITOOL THAT FITS ON YOUR KEYS

The Gerber Artifact is a “pocket-sized companion keychain tool” that tackles seven different annoying situations you might need tools for on a daily basis. The 3.5″ (when closed) Artifact is constructed from stainless steel, with a titanium nitride coating. The Artifact includes: Philips screwdriver, two flat-head screwdrivers, bottle opener, pry bar, wire stripper and replaceable #11 hobby blades (because they always break). It also includes a lanyard, but we don’t consider that a tool or see it helping you all that often. Outside of the #11 hobby blade (think X-Acto), the tool is also TSA-compliant–just make sure you take that blade out before you get to the security line. Just be careful when you’re opening it so you don’t stab yourself in the leg.

[MIKA27]

MISC. GOODS CERAMIC FLASK

Who says your flask needs to be a cold, characterless piece of metal you want to hide away in your pocket?

The Misc. Goods Ceramic Flask is a beautifully-crafted white clay vessel, made in the USA, and finished with the kind of details that make you want to show it off. Each flask sports attractive embossing across both faces, and measures just over four inches tall and six inches high. Two leather straps — an oil-tanned darker one and a vegetable-tanned lighter one — secure the cork stopper with the help of a brass stud and a brass button.

[MIKA27]

STEAKCHAMP THERMOMETER

Cooking a steak to the perfect level of doneness can be tough — no matter if you've spent years working a grill, or you're a novice when it comes to cooking meat — but with the SteakChamp Thermometer you can cook your beef to medium rare every time.

Just insert this simple meat thermometer into your steak, turn up the heat, and wait. Once its built-in LED starts flashing rapidly, it's time to take it off the fire to let it rest (you'll know it's totally ready when the light turns off). And since it's made from high-quality stainless steel, you know it'll last for years and be easy to clean.

[MIKA27]

LIGHTBOX

Lightbox is the world´s smallest social camera, it is designed to work together with your smartphone and lets you take photos and stream live video hands-free. The tiny wearable camera attaches to almost anything via a patented magnetic clip and works with your smartphone through built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Lightbox is waterproof and packs an 8MP HD sensor, a powerful video processor and built in cloud storage and sharing. You can even program the sleek device to snap automatically.

The innovative Lightbox is currently running a Kickstarter campaign, check it out here

[MIKA27]

PORTABLE HOME FIRE ESCAPE LADDER

Awareness of risks and potential dangers in and around a home is very important, and preparing and practicing a home fire escape plan is essential and greatly increases the chances of surviving. Be prepared for an emergency with the compact and portable Fire Escape Ladder by Fire Alert, it easily deploys from standard residential windows and is exceptionally strong and durable.

[MIKA27]

LIGHTHOUSE 250 | LANTERN + USB POWER HUB

The Lighthouse 250 Lantern by Goal Zero is an essential piece of equipment for any outdoorsman. Not only is it a powerful lantern but also a USB Power Hub, allowing you to charge small handheld devices thanks to a built-in USB port. The handy device is capable of beaming 250 lumens of bright, LED light, has up to 48 hour run time, and is quickly recharged from USB, solar or using the included hand crank.

[MIKA27]

Nobody Drops Insults Quite Like Cersei Lannister

Cersei Lannister is cold in Game Of Thrones, and Lena Heady’s performance of the Lion-family matriarch is brilliant. Turns out all that sass can be replicated over goblets of wine as Jimmy Kimmel explored in a recent interview.

In an interview about the show’s season finale, Kimmel and Heady decided to share a goblet and have an insult-off. All the great threats and insults delivered by Cersei in the show are normally over goblets of wine, so it’s an appropriate replication.

[MIKA27]

The Wobbling Stairs At This World Cup Stadium Look Ready To Collapse

Given that Brazil has spent around $US14 billion getting ready to host the 2014 World Cup, you’d think they’d have sufficient funds to install staircases that weren’t made of scaffolding. I mean, just look at those steps shake under the load of hundreds of futbol fans.

In this raw video from what looks like outside Estadio Beira-Rio in the city of Rio de Janeiro, you can clearly see not just the handrails but the entire structure of the staircase swaying under the momentum and weight of all those fans. Plus that’s at least four flights up, from what we can see — and situated above concrete. Here’s what the stadium itself looks like from inside:

It’s likely that these stairs (which look very temporary) were designed for a certain amount of deflection — or movement — under such massive loads. But this much swaying isn’t normal, and you definitely wouldn’t want to be anywhere near them in the event of an emergency.

[Habana Mike]

Genetically-Modified Australian Bananas Are Ready For Human Testing

It’s been nearly a decade in development, but a genetically modified breed of bananas that’s designed to combat starvation will soon enter human testing. The bananas are rich in beta-carotene which turns into vitamin A in the body. For the children in Africa suffering from vitamin A deficiencies, this is a godsend. Also these banana are orange.

The specific research is happening at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia thanks, in part, to nearly $US10 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The idea, however, is to pass off the seeds for these super bananas to farmers in Uganda, where there’s a huge food shortage and 70 per cent of the population survives on the fruit. Vitamin A deficiencies are not only killing children but also causing them to go blind, so the research moving forward is a very good thing.

These are no ordinary bananas. They’re grown in far north Queensland to boost the beta-carotene levels. The flesh of the super bananas is also orange which provides a visual clue to their genetically-modified otherness. It’s also sort of awesome.

This breakthrough is not entirely thanks to the possibilities of frankenfruit. A good old fashioned crossbreed of native banana with orange flesh in Micronesia called the “karat” has been used to improve eye sight in children for centuries. By the early 2000s, scientists in Queensland were exploring ways to cultivate the karat and, for whatever reason, decided to go the route of genetic modification.

Trials of the super bananas will take place in the United States and are expected to last through the end of the year. If all goes well — and the scientists are confident it will — Ugandan farmers will be growing the new bananas by 2020. “We know our science will work,” says James Dale, who’s led the research for years. And creepy as genetically modified foods may be, there’s nothing quite like science that works.

I've no problem with naturally modifying fruits via genetics through cross-pollinating genes, that's been done for centuries in the wild.

It's when scientists introduce biogenetic traits through modifying DNA by introducing, deleting or mutating genes unnaturally that creeps me out.

An orange banana that could have actually evolved is one thing, Adding genes from orangutans to get that color is another IMO.

[MIKA27]

Harley Davidson's Electric Motorbike Concept Sounds Incredible

http://youtu.be/t6F8O5A__Ds

You can always hear a Harley Davidson rider coming. Whether it’s the roar of the bike itself or just the deafening cry of “freedom!” flanked by a squadron of Bald Eagles. But this is different. This is Project Livewire: Harley Davidson’s first electric motorcycle. And it sounds amazing.

Harley claims the bike can do 0-60mph in just four seconds. Rather than bellowing its way along the open road, the new Harley whirrs by in a blur of future.

It’s styled in the traditional Harley black with red accents here and there, with traditional handlebar placement rather than a chopper-style affair.

Livewire isn’t available for sale, instead Harley Davidson will take it around the US on a tour to ask customers what they want from an electric bike.

If it’s anything like the Livewire, it might just be the first Harley Davidson I actually want to buy.

[MIKA27]

Living In Space Is Like Being Old And Having Type-2 Diabetes

We’ve known since the initial Apollo missions that travelling through space does strange things to the human body, but the initial results from a study of Commander Hadfield during his time aboard the ISS suggest these detrimental effects might be much worse than we had thought.

The results of the study, conducted by a University of Waterloo team led by Richard Hughson, are set to be announced at a scientific conference in Waterloo next Tuesday and reportedly illustrate a number of serious health issues that will confront long-term space voyagers. The most serious of which is a condition that mimics type-2 diabetes.

During Hadfield’s five months aboard the ISS, he and four other members of his crew exhibited both elevated levels of insulin and other diabetes-related blood factors, though none of them actually showed symptoms of being diabetic. Hughson believes that the extreme sedentary nature of the astronaut’s life in space — without even gravity to force one into maintaining posture — is a primary factor in the emergence of these blood factors. “They [astronauts] are the most sedentary working population that you can find,” Professor Hughson told the Globe and Mail.

And that’s not the only danger facing long-term astronauts. As Scott Smith, manager for nutritional biochemistry at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, explains, “In a month of spaceflight you see about the same change in bone that you see in a year in a postmenopausal woman. It’s like doing time-lapse photography.” There’s also the danger of going space blind, as Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk did in 2009, due to uncontrollable swelling of his optic nerves.

Together, these physiological symptoms — bone loss, reduced mental capacity, and farsightedness — all closely resemble what our elderly suffer here on Earth. This could eventually lead to better treatments for these diseases and a more robust understanding of the human ageing process in general. And hopefully there’s also a solution that will let us keep our astronauts safe in orbit too.